First encounter

I had seen glimpses of it as I walked past on my way to AP Geometry, but now I was about to enter the school computer lab for the first time.

It was September 1980 and my freshman year at Gateway High School had been knocked off-kilter barely a week into the first term. I had signed up for Russian 1, which involved a daily bus ride to the nearby high school in Aurora, Colorado where it was offered. My excitement at learning the language of the enemy during the height of the Cold War dropped considerably when only four students—from across the entire school district—showed up the first day of class. Such low enrollment meant Russian was cancelled a few short days later, forcing me to rework my schedule. I substituted Latin for Russian—which eliminated the need to hop on a bus each day— and that in turn opened a spot on my schedule for Introduction to Computer Programming.

My children have a hard time grasping this, but in 1980 the only computing devices I ran into on a daily basis were either calculators or video games. Sure, I might get a glimpse of the mainframe in the school office now and again, but my hands-on computing time happened either on my Sears-branded Intellivision knock-off or at the local arcade.

The computers in the lab at Gateway were unlike any I’d seen before. They were blue metal boxes with black keyboards and 9" black-and-white TVs perched on top, and several were hooked up to teletypes. Chained to the desk next to them were cheap cassette tape decks. Big block letters informed me that these were Ohio Scientific Challenger 2P computers.

Priced at $495, the Challenger 2P sported a whopping 4KB of RAM, a 32x32 character display, and support for Microsoft BASIC—all powered by a MOS Technology 6502 processor running at 1MHz. Even by the standards of the day, these tech specs were a bit underwhelming. (The Apple ][+ came out the same year as the 2P—1979—and offered up to 16KB of RAM and 16 color graphics at 40x48 characters.) But that didn’t matter to me, because I now had access to a computer. And I could make it do whatever I wanted.

Enlarge/ One of the Challenger 2Ps in use at the computer lab at Gateway High School in 1980.

1981 Gateway Olympiad

We started the class with basic BASIC programming, simple stuff really.

Boring? Well, kind of. But one day I wandered by the computer lab during lunch and saw an upperclassman playing what looked like a game. A little USS Enterprise was being guided by keyboard presses across the TV screen as it avoided a bunch of asterisks. The game was primitive, even compared to my next door neighbor’s Atari 2600, but the student had written it himself.

The video shown on the 9” black-and-white TVs used 1KB of memory. That 32x32 display worked out to 1,024 characters, but only 576 would actually show up (the rest were reserved as a sort of guard buffer). It was possible to write directly to the display, check to see if a given spot on the screen contained a particular character, and move characters around the display with the keyboard. I was immediately and irrevocably sucked in.

The Challenger 2P included graphical characters in addition to ASCII characters.

My spare time at school became devoted to successfully mixing the Star Wars and Star Trek universes by writing a two-player game that pitted the USS Enterprise against a TIE fighter (represented by a left-arrow and a right-arrow symbol). Should a phaser (hyphen) shot from the Enterprise score a hit, the TIE fighter would blow up—well, not so much "blow up" as be transformed into a pair of asterisks.

This snippet from Challenger 2P game Tank For Twooffers an idea of what my own code looked like:

The POKE command was used to render a particular character on the display, with the variable to the left of the comma representing the location in memory and the one to the right the character to be inserted there. PEEK was used to read the contents of a point in memory, determining whether the laser shot from the tie fighter scored a hit on the Enterprise. It was heady stuff for a high school freshman in 1980.

Given my current occupation, it will come to no surprise that I spent every moment I could in the computer lab. I began buying and subscribing to computer magazines, manually inputting text-based games like Hunt the Wumpus, and saving them on my growing library of cassette tapes. If I forgot to bring a tape with me, there was the option of using one of the teletypes to print the program as a series of raised dots on a strip of paper. Loading from the spool didn't always work perfectly, so I would also have the teletype loudly print out my original code for reentry, just in case.

Over Christmas break I even got to take one of the machines and its black-and-white TV home. Unfortunately, I lost two days of computing fun to a blown fuse on the 2P—yes, an actual glass tube fuse.

I desperately wanted a Challenger computer of my own. Even though the TV and stereo shop at Aurora Mall sold the Atari 400, and although the TRS-80 was available at Radio Shack, I would always head straight to JCPenney and then to the electronics department. There, in all of its color glory, sat a $600 Challenger 4P. But despite my best efforts, my mother was unimpressed by the possibilities of a personal computer in the house, and my entreaties to buy one fell on deaf ears. It would be another year before I bought my first computer, a Timex Sinclair ZX80 kit that I could never use because of an unfortunate soldering accident during assembly.

That's me: top row, far right.

1981 Gateway Olympiad

When I showed up for my sophomore year, however, the Ohio Scientific computers were gone, replaced by Apple ][ and Apple ][+ computers with 5-1/2” floppy drives and monochrome green monitors. While I was disappointed not to see the familiar blue boxes, I quickly learned the Apples were far more powerful.

Three decades later, Ohio Scientific is nothing more than a memory. The Challenger 2P was succeeded by the 4P (color!) and, eventually, by the Challenger 8P before the company was purchased in 1981 and its PC lineup was discontinued. Sadly, my programming skills are mostly memory now as well, but the experience wasn't a waste. If more Colorado kids had wanted to speak Russian, my life might have taken a much different path. Instead, I had the opportunity to cultivate a love of computers as something I could not only use, but as devices I could tinker with, build upon, and ultimately control.

Eric Bangeman
Eric has been using personal computers since 1980 and writing about them at Ars Technica since 2003, where he currently serves as Managing Editor. Twitter@ericbangeman

51 Reader Comments

That pretty got me hooked on computers and tech in general. After that I spent a lot of time reading books and magazines at the library. My first encounter at open source was BASIC code for games in magazines.

I got my start on the Commodore Pet, then the TRS-80. I have strong memories of both. Most of my programming on the TRS-80 involved hand-writing/converting assembler code into machine language and poking it into memory. I spent well over a year doing that before I finally bought a copy of EDTASM...

My first computer was a TRS-80, then I got an Ohio Scientific Challenger 4P. I learned a lot building boards, programming in assembler, et al. The Synertek 6502 book had a schematic for doing single-step control, I implemented that and installed LEDs for the address & data buses.

I built an 8-bit A/D board and connected a joystick to it.

I loved how they used cheap Molex connecters to keep the costs down!

Sadly, in the mid 80s I gave it to a girlfriend's kid so he could learn. Wish I had kept it. And I wish I had kept my original Data General Nova and Teletype ASR-35, both in perfect working condition. Although I don't think I can still buy paper tapes...

In 1980 I wanted nothing more than an Apple ][ but for a 13 year old the $3000 cost was beyond me or my parents. Back then if you were a computer enthusiast it didn't matter so much if you were a punk kid so I spent my Summer at the local computer shop demonstrating the units to any customers who came by. I must have been good at it (or maybe I reminded the owner of himself) but he didn't seem to mind me hanging around. As the Summer drew nigh and grade nine loomed ahead I was lamenting the loss of what to me was a magical (sorry Steve) time to a young geeky mind. I think I might have actually cried when the store owner called me into the back and said he appreciated me helping over the summer (I was there every day except Sunday) and I could take home the Challenger 2P, just like in the picture above.

I have lots of fond memories of that Challenger 2P, the Summer of computer discovery. I don't have that computer anymore, I traded it for an old dirt-bike when I turned 15. I'm still a geek though and I owe it all to Paul, the store owner, who took me under his arm. I lost track of him, but if you are reading this Merry Christmas, and thanks!

In the early 1980's while my friends all had Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s, my patents bought an Oric-1. Apparently something about it being better/more powerful/more suited to education rather than gaming. None of which was true of course. And if memory serves it was £5 more expensive too.

Never heard of it? Neither has anyone else.And when it was time to upgrade they chose... it's successor the Oric Atmos.

Displaying a lack of backwards compatibility, the few games available for the original machine would not run on the new machine. And almost no games were written (or converted) for the new machine, while my friends could choose from hundreds.

I remember the days of buying a computer magazine and typing in pages and pages of code, leaving the machine running overnight because you couldn't save partway through, hoping that the cat hadn't sabotaged your work during the night.

Moral of the story : sometimes it's better to swallow your pride and choose the popular/well supported model than than the serious/worthy model.

I bought my first PC in 1980 while I was in the Navy. An AIM-65, but I paid extra for the 4KB RAM instead of the standard 1KB, and I got the BASIC ROM as well. Lots of fun with 6502 assembly language. I had to solder together a bread-board to interface with the cassette tape for mass storage, but once I did, I didn't have to re-type the programs every time I turned off the computer. Woohoo!

Of course I wanted an Apple ][, but the price was more than I'd paid for my car! A couple of years later I did manage to score an Apple //e though.

early 1970stalking to our [internal] accountant over the phone [he was on vacation]I got to enter a new tax rate by hand in hex for our Boroughs book keeping machinethe program loaded with a paper tape, AR data stored on ledger cardsit had a hard drive as I recall; computation was electronic

then around 1981we had an IBM 38 for the IBM accounting and manufacturing software[it was later replaced with a unix 386 and wise terminals]but back in 81 the accounting dept also had an 8086 PCtwo 5" floppies [one for dos, one for 123]pin feed printer and B&W then later 16 color video

early 1990sthe first family PC was a 486-33 4Mb ramISA vga 256Kb 6.0 dos 3.1 win

[sold the business in 93 and retired]

mid 90 to mid 00moving to P1/P4 as our daughters college work progressed [MBA JD LLM]and lots of cast off computers from our son [still] the bleeding edge gamerand a new i7 for me this yearmy 10 YO P4 re purposed with NAS4Free

the oldest working computer that I haveis an AMD 486-120 clone over clocked to 160 Mhz [FSB set to 40] DSL OS

I grew up before computers started to be used anywhere else than large airconditioned rooms. In 1982 I figured what the hell, I gotta figure out these things so I bought a Kaypro II. Actually it was the first computer that Andrew Kay produced, but it was competing with the Apple ][, so whatever. It was an all-in-one machine, a "portable" that was the size of a portable sewing machine and weighed 29 lbs. A Zilog Z80, 64k ram and two double density 5 1/4 floppies. The OS was CP/M. I remember that I had the system on one 360k floppy and all my data and games on the other. Taught myself that computers could actually do something useful after learning Basic.

I used that machine until the spring of 1984 when I passed by an office equipment store in Minneapolis, MN and saw one of the first Macintosh's on display running MacPaint and I've been drinking the cool-aid ever since. Sold that Kaypro to some guy who wanted a portable computer to take to Africa to write a book (really!!).

Editor Moonshark says:

First computer I got was a VIC-20. Use to type out the source code in Compute just for fun. But mainly enjoyed it for games. I think it was about the time I started university where computers stopped being fun. Too many recursion and delta-epsilon proofs can do that to a person. Got worse after school when I realized just how much I didn't know, classic Dunning-Kruger effect. Then one day I realized what I was doing day to day was really no different then typing out stuff as a kid. Either that or after 10 years of working with MS products, I guess I finally "caught up". Been rather enjoyable since even though there's always something new right around the corner it just doesn't hurt as much.

The first PC ever to be in our household was a 286 (I forget the make/brand). I can still remember looking for some kind of game in DOS, and finding FLASH.EXE... (oh boy, oh boy).I messed with it, trying to get it to run, completely convinced it would be fun if I could, and provided it with some random text file.

Yay! I though as the screen went blank except for a blinking underscore in the top left, it's gonna start soon!5 minutes later I powered off and turned the computer back on.

It was a short lived experience. To this day, I still lament the name FLASH, it seemed so like it would be a game!

There was no such thing as a PC when I got started in early 1970 on a Burroughs B5500 mainframe at college. I programmed mostly in FORTRAN but played around some with SNOBOL, LISP and APL. My degree was in Electrical Engineering because they hadn't come up with a Computer Science degree yet. My first post college job got me started with IBM mainframes, a System 360/85 to start with, and a new language, PL/I.

It wasn't until 1982 that I got my first IBM PC. I upgraded that little box to the hilt, giving it 576KB of memory, two floppy drives, an 80286 processor card, and a huge 23MB hard disk--2.3 times the capacity of what IBM sold with their PC/XT. And that drive only cost $2700, half what other, smaller drives were going for. Such a deal!

In the mid '90s I switched from mainframes to Unix servers in my job, and after OS X came out, I made the switch to Apple. First thing I did when I got my first Mac was to find my way to the Unix command line.

My first machine was a Sinclair as well. I paid the extra buck for the awesome 16k rampack that hung on the back. I still have it, and if I can find a power supply, a black and white tv, and a tape cassette deck, I am going to fire it up and see what I have forgotten. That was a great machine for its time. For about 2 months.....

I couldn't possibly tell you the name/type of the first computer I used. It was my grandmother's, she worked as an offsite book-keeper for Coca-Cola and had a system in the late 80s to early 90s with 3.5" 5.25" and Tape drive, Orange/black tandy monitor, and it could play Roger Wilco and some Dungeons and Dragons variant that my cousin showed me.

It also had a typing tutor in which letters or words would assault a city scape as they fell from space, and occasionally one would charge across the screen left-to-right or vice-verse complete with charge trumpet noise.

After that in 92 I switched schools to one with a full computer lab of clones running dos6 and windows 3.1. In one hour of lab time my teacher would enforce proper touch-typing in "Touch Typing for Beginners" for 20 minutes, your timer, naturally, would start over if he saw you look at your hands. We had a considerable collection of entertainment and edutainment games however. (YAY LOGO-Writer and Reader Rabbit). Those of us in the know, learned how to navigate in DOS to the fun games, there was a spiderman game, geurillas and other classics. It was fun throwing explosive bananas back and forth.

I am in the posession of my grandfather's ohio scientific, his tapes, a ton of documentation including many issues of the monthly newsletter, and even the hand drawn schematics for a printer controller he engineered for it. I really should take the time to go through all of it as it is one of the most documented simple computers I have seen.

I learned in the early nineties, just before and mostly during the era of Windows 95. My first computer came with Conway's Game of Life, which is largely responsible for my love of computers, along with Minesweeper, SkiFree and other classic Windows 95 games.

My first computer was an Atari 800XL I got 19 years ago next Tuesday (it was a Christmas present). It was a 64KB, 6502-based system that had the misfortune of coming out around the same time and market point as the Commodore 64 (which I had eventually, too) and all but disappeared into the annuls of history.

I ended up learning how to do "character graphics" consisting of POKEing the memory locations for the character set and inserting custom pictures. I also dabbled in Player-Missile graphics (Atari's name for sprites) which was also centered around POKE and PEEK commands.

To think I did all of that when I was 10 years old boggles my mind today.

I had one of these. They were notable for the compromises they made to keep costs down, such as use of a single board for the entire system- the keyboard was soldered right onto the system board. The screen resolution was low so that you could use a regular TV set for the display. Program storage was on cassette tape. A floppy drive back then cost as much as this whole system.

I thought their expansion board was over-priced, so I nibbled a hole through the side of the case and used a ribbon cable to connect to a wire-wrapped homebrew expansion board. Static RAM, no parity. 4Kb was the hot new chip at the time, purchased from DigiKey, which is still going.

For floppy disk drives, there were the 8" drives... There were the 3-1/2" drives made popular on Macintoshes and several 68000-based machines of the era, befo they were common on PCs and compatibles. Between them, there were variations of 5-1/4" drives, but for the life of me, I've never known of 5-1/2" drives in reality, and they were NEVER sold by Apple!

There have been other odd sizes of smaller disks and their drives used on computers an MIDI devices, sure, but never a 5-1/2" drive: it's painful to read such horrible inaccuracies in an otherwise-great article, and raises doubts on the accuracy of the other things when that simple thing is easily checked and flat out wrong.

For floppy disk drives, there were the 8" drives... There were the 3-1/2" drives made popular on Macintoshes and several 68000-based machines of the era, befo they were common on PCs and compatibles. Between them, there were variations of 5-1/4" drives, but for the life of me, I've never known of 5-1/2" drives in reality, and they were NEVER sold by Apple!

There have been other odd sizes of smaller disks and their drives used on computers an MIDI devices, sure, but never a 5-1/2" drive: it's painful to read such horrible inaccuracies in an otherwise-great article, and raises doubts on the accuracy of the other things when that simple thing is easily checked and flat out wrong.

Or alternatively, it's just a typo.

A quick application of Ockham's Razor can help you avoid getting all worked up over nothing...

I started with an TI SR-52 calculator at school and then we got a Wang PCS-II I could use after school, but my first home computer was the OSI C2-4P (which sounds like what you describe here). It had a special TV with a composite port wired in to display the 64 characters per line.

I learned MS BASIC and 6502 assembly, learning to program stuff like the DAC to draw on an oscilliscope or simulate guitar strings. Eventually I wired in some Atari joysticks to key switches and then added a color graphics board with 32KB of RAM, but still using a tape player for program storage. It is still at my parent's house.

Later I bought an Atari 400 and used Action! to go far beyond the C2-4P's capabilities. By then I was contrasting VT's punched card and Vax terminal programming with Atari's full color sprites.

I got my start on the Commodore Pet, then the TRS-80. I have strong memories of both. Most of my programming on the TRS-80 involved hand-writing/converting assembler code into machine language and poking it into memory. I spent well over a year doing that before I finally bought a copy of EDTASM...

LOVELY memories. I like articles like this.

Programming in assembler / machine language gives you an entirely different outlook on computing.

I wonder how many new programmers understand just how lucky they are to have languages like C.

Holy nostalgia, batman! We had a Challenger 2P sitting in the garage when I was a kid. I remember many hours playing a very blocky version of space invaders, lovingly loaded from the funky green cassette tape (or was space invaders a beige tape?)

First computer I touched was a DEC PDP-8E. I didn't really understand what I was doing at the time, but I could make the lights (light bulbs, not LEDs) move in different patterns and copy what I did with the toggle switches. But turning it on made the lights dim so dad wouldn't let me use it very much.

Finally when I got to high school a few friends had Atari 400s and 800s, so I moved into that camp. We liked to make fun of the lousy sound and graphics on the Apple ]['s in the computer lab. I used to stay up late either playing games, typing in programs from magazines, or experimenting, then watch David Letterman on the 13" TV it used. If Letterman hadn't been around I might have gone into computing instead of television. I could have gone either way at the time. Later on in college I made some money by typing up papers for other students. I still have a large amount of Atari hardware, and many of the floppies still read OK.

Though I had played with programmable calculators (I owned an HP-25), my first computer was an Ohio Scientific C2-4P purchased in 1978. At $650 it came with 1K of RAM. Fortunately I already had a cheap cassette recorder for storage and was able to pick up a small black&white TV for just a few dollars.

Eventually I upgraded to 2K of RAM. Though I burnt out the first additional memory I had purchased because I had plugged the chips in the wrong way. (I had no instructions and this was long before the internet was around to look things up.)

I had a lot of fun programming that machine. In addition to the 8K BASIC interpreter, you could write in machine code. My favorite activity was improving upon other people's BASIC programs by writing machine language subroutines to speed up certain operations like screen clears. It was very easy to mix in machine code with an existing BASIC program by using a BASIC command to call machine language subroutines. I believe the BASIC command was: X=USR(X).

Of course I wanted an Apple ][, but the price was more than I'd paid for my car! A couple of years later I did manage to score an Apple //e though.

Some things never change, eh? I bought the much cheaper and better-spec'ed Commodore 64 for myself, but regretted it almost immediately once I started programming the thing. Apple was more expensive, yet vastly more elegant, IMO, even back then.

Love these articles... swap out a few details (e.g. original Bell & Howell Apple II for Ohio Scientific) and 7th grade vs. High School, and it mirrors my own experience, almost to the letter.

What I miss - and what I think the kids today just don't get - is having that level of direct access to the machine. Where to even use the machine, you needed to know your shit, and you could build something genuinely useful yourself and you did, because, hey, why else would you be into computers if you couldn't make your own stuff? And you could simply list the code of any software you bought and tweak it, if you wanted. And debugging via printouts of code, and having to think about your code. What a concept.

Also, at that time, being "into computers" was the rare exception rather than the norm, and those who were into computers had a common bond that nobody else could remotely understand, it was like being from a different planet. There was platform contention even back then of course (i.e. TRS-80 vs. Apple), but it was all done with smirks, rather than the level of vitriol being spewed nowadays. And we all read Byte Magazine. Love these trips down memory lane.

We'd hand-write long machine language programs, converting all the op-codes into decimal bytes, and the program would have hundreds of "Data" statements of just numbers that we Poke into memory with For/Read/Poke/Next loop and then execute.

Zero debugging capability when you do that! Get it right, or it just locks up!

At the time, I didn't even know there was such a thing as an "Assembler" program.

First computer I used was an Apple II or IIe in grade school. Did some BASIC and LOGO programming (man that turtle looked messed up if you didn't type in the code properly..).First computer I owned was a C-64, later with Datasette, then 1541 5.25" floppy drive. Spent days typing in programs from the book it came with, and later from Compute! Magazine (still my fave all time Computer magazine).First PC I used wasn't until High School, Tandy 1000's in the lab, and PC's XT''s and AT's in the library. Got my first PC soon after, and almost immediately opened it up to see what was inside. Haven't stopped since.

I got started on a 386 my parents bought in 1991 via Computer Shopper. I claimed it for myself when they replaced it with a 486 a few years later, and I used the 386 until it died. I was well on my way to becoming a software engineer well before I was out of Elementary school, however.

The saddening thing is that we're going to see kids of all kinds grow up in households that have only iPads and iPhones, where no such tinkering can take place. They'll have to convince their parents to buy additional hardware rather than use what they already have available. A much higher step to climb than being able to use what you have.